Between May and July is bug season. If you haven’t finished your outside work by then, it’s not getting started until August. Factors outside of your control now control your work. Bugs are everywhere and they drive what we do, even if they are completely unrelated to it.
Believe it or not, if you do bit by bit each day, each week, it does work. It just depends on whether the bit you are doing is actually worthwhile. I.e., running 5 minutes a day might not help too much, running 20 probably better. Doing learning on new topics, a chapter a day will render results, a page not so much. Bit by Bit works as long as the bits are worth the effort.
When we had to buy hardware to set up your tests, we were efficient as hell. We would spend weeks, maybe even months, watching for deals and agonizing over cache, RAM, CPU, disk arrays, and storage size. Someone still has to do that to make the implementation of clouds effective, but you don’t have to do it anymore. We barely have server rooms anymore. Now you want to try out a virtual machine or build…
Not in your job description, but in the work that you do. The training. The coaching. The mentoring. The writing. The work that never makes it to a job description, but always elevates you. That is the work that you do.
When you have others asking you to finish work by a certain date, the timelines are imposed upon you. You can complain about them being too tight, but the fact remains – you have a timeline to finish your wor,k and people are depending upon you. Set the timeline for yourself, and only you are depending on you. Oddly enough, despite our anger, it’s when others depend upon us that we push ourselves harder to…